


no comfort in the truth

by nothingunrealistic



Category: Dear Evan Hansen - Pasek & Paul/Levenson
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Canon Compliant, I Don't Even Know, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, M/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-29
Updated: 2018-11-29
Packaged: 2019-09-02 02:05:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16777477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nothingunrealistic/pseuds/nothingunrealistic
Summary: Like everyone in the world, Evan has the last words his soulmate will ever say to him on his skin.Evan hears a lot of last words during his senior year.





	1. standing by and waiting

**Author's Note:**

> Three days ago, I set out to write a Kleinsen soulmate AU. I ended up with this, which is kind of that and also kind of not? Zoe's much more present than I expected her to be? Like I said in the tags, I don't even know.
> 
> Also, this does take some details from the novel, albeit after being placed in a blender and and pureed for five minutes on high speed, but you don't need to be familiar with (or acknowledge the existence of) the novel to get this.
> 
> Fic title from "Careless Whisper" by George Michael. Cue saxophone riff.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from "You Belong With Me" by Taylor Swift.

According to Evan’s mom, when he was born, she took one look on the words on his arm and burst out laughing — “although,” she always adds, “the epidurals definitely had something to do with it. Those were strong drugs, for sure,” and another laugh.

He’s hardly the first baby to come out with profanity printed somewhere on him, but no one ever seems to get used to it. Otherwise there wouldn’t be such a huge market for sleeves and knee-length socks and chokers to cover up people’s marks, to keep something private. No one wants to walk around in public and let total strangers see that the last thing their perfect match will ever say to them is _I hate you_ or _go fuck yourself_ or _I’m taking the cat, you piece of shit._

Evan doesn’t know what his mom’s mark says, but he knows it’s not whatever his dad said to her before he moved all the way to Colorado to get away from them. Maybe that’s why she works in a nursing home — there’s a pretty high proportion of people there who heard their words on someone’s dying breath, who whispered the words on their soulmate’s skin as the end of a decades-long conversation. People whose marks say _I love you_ and _please don’t cry_ and _I’ll wait for you._ Maybe she wants to believe that kind of bond is still possible.

Evan has his doubts.

* * *

He wonders sometimes if he’d be different if his words were different, less aggressive, less angry. If he constantly corrects himself and tries to stay out of sight and carries out conversations like he’s walking on glass because he’s trying to put off the day when his Person with a capital P will lose their patience and snap at him before walking out of his life forever.

Or maybe they’ll leave him because he’s the way he is. It’s a chicken-egg problem: will his soulmate grow to hate him because he’s an anxious mess, or is he an anxious mess because his soulmate will one day hate him? There’s no way of knowing until the egg hatches. Or gets smashed. Or something else that happens to eggs. Analogies always break down somewhere.

So he hides himself, and he hides his mark. The only person who’s seen it, other than his parents and a handful of doctors, is Jared, who read it aloud once when they were seven, laughed, got scolded by his mom both for swearing and for making fun of someone’s words, and never mentioned it again. Come to think of it, Jared is also the only person whose mark Evan has seen. They were nine, changing clothes to go swimming, and when Jared took off his shirt, there’d been five words, printed small, across his chest. Then he caught Evan trying to read them and turned away.

It explains why Jared always wears a T-shirt to go swimming. And why Evan didn’t get invited along as much after that.

Evan doesn’t stare anymore. At least, he tries not to.

But they still spend time together, now and again, and one of the benefits of Jared saying “fuck” every five minutes is that Evan doesn’t get jumpy every time someone says it around him.

* * *

Dr. Sherman doesn’t know what Evan’s mark says. Evan’s never showed him, or told him. Maybe he should — emotional openness and all that, and it’s the kind of thing that therapist-client confidentiality would keep private — but somehow he just… can’t. Thankfully Dr. Sherman isn’t the type to pry.

The summer before his senior year, however, a handful of brand-new medical professionals get to see his words for themselves. Not that they care, probably, as preoccupied as they are with the broken bone underneath. They cover up his arm for him, first with a splint, then with a cast. He’s not sure if it feels like a second chance or a cruel joke.

Evan should have known when he let go of the tree that it wouldn’t work. No one had said those words to him before he started climbing.

* * *

His mom hands him a Sharpie on the first day of school, urging him to get his cast signed, wanting to replace the words on his arm as much as he does. He asks Alana, who barely listens or lets her smile drop, and Jared, who refuses without saying no, and Zoe, who — he tells himself this for the rest of the day when he’s supposed to be paying attention, staring at ceilings and walls throughout class — would have signed it if he’d just repeated himself loud enough for her to hear.

Instead, it’s Connor. It’s Connor who asks what happened to his arm, Connor who asks for a Sharpie, Connor who doesn’t apologize for shoving him to the ground. At least, not aloud.

And it’s Connor who reads the letter and demands to know if it’s about his sister, Connor who scares the shit out of Evan even before he yells “Fuck you!”, shaking with rage, and bolts. When that happens, Evan runs after him, desperate to get his letter back or to hear if Connor will say just two more words. To know if one quiet conversation meant anything at all.

It’s Connor’s parents who give the letter back to him, calling it Connor’s last words. Calling him Connor’s best and most dearest friend. Seeing a name on his arm instead of an insult.

He knows it’s not the truth, and he tries to tell them so. The problem with that is he can’t say for sure what the truth is.

* * *

“His parents think you were soulmates,” is the first thing Jared says when Evan finishes debriefing him on the dinner that went completely wrong. “You realize that, right?”

“What? Why would they think that?”

“Um. You were best friends, but he kicked your ass the last time he saw you? And he wrote a letter to you specifically right before he died? That’s, like, the exact formula for tragically doomed soulmates.”

“Oh my God.” That is pretty much the plot of half the sad movies about soulmates. How did he not realize that when he was saying it?

“This is why I told you — what did I tell you?” Jared’s voice is tinny over Skype, but his tone of exasperation is crystal-clear. “You just nod and confirm.”

“I tried to. I just, you don’t understand,” Evan insists, because he doesn’t, Jared doesn’t get that you can’t just tell a crying mother that her son had the worst possible reputation at school or that he wasn’t your friend but could have been, if one thing had gone differently. “I got nervous and I started talking, and then once I started, I just…”

“You couldn’t stop.”

Well. Maybe Jared does understand. He has a strange way of doing that sometimes.

* * *

A small part of Evan — the naïve, idealistic part that’s avoided being completely squashed somehow — has hoped for years that Zoe could be his soulmate. Another part of him has insisted that that’s impossible for a long list of reasons, chief among them that Zoe is too kind, too warm and considerate, to belong with him, or to shout things at him like what’s written on his arm.

That illusion starts to fade at the first ill-fated dinner, when she insists, sullenly, that Connor was a bad person, that there was nothing good about him; it shatters completely after he brings over the emails, when he hears, from the Murphys’ garage, her yelling about Connor and the “fucking Brady Bunch,” and shoves down the nervous laugh that tries to escape him, because he knows it isn’t funny.

Evan doesn’t even think she’s wrong about Connor. She knew him better than Evan did. But he realizes now that Zoe’s angry — an anger similar to but not the same as Connor’s, a family resemblance — and that, unlike Connor, she tries in public not to be angry, to be nice and thoughtful and friendly to everyone.

It reminds Evan of himself, actually. Zoe’s just way better at it than he is.

* * *

Connor’s parents never ask Evan if they were soulmates, thankfully, or what his mark says.

Once his story escapes onto the Internet, though, the hundreds of thousands of people who latch onto The Connor Project aren’t nearly so considerate. They get at least a dozen comments every day demanding to know what Connor and Evan’s last words to each other were, and for once, Evan is grateful for his cast.

* * *

The only thing harder to believe than Zoe kissing him is that it’s not a one-time thing, that she comes back again and again to kiss him and hold his hand and hang out with him and ask him about his day. That they’re… dating, maybe. That the possibility of them being soulmates still survives.

She’s happy for him when he gets his cast off, if not so thrilled as Jared heavy-handedly hinted, but she doesn’t ask to see Evan’s words, and doesn’t show hers to him.

“I think it skews things, if other people see it,” she explains. “If someone knows they’re never going to see you again, they might say it, to make you think they were your soulmate. Just as a way to hurt you.”

“That makes sense,” Evan says, and it does. Another reason to hide.

Jared’s mark is still the only one he’s seen, and Evan can hardly recall what it says, barely knew in the first place. Does Jared remember Evan’s words, or is that something else that he has to be paid to care about?

* * *

It was never going to be Alana. She and Evan get along fine, they’re capable of working together, but they don’t _click,_ as classmates or as colleagues. That, and Evan suspects she’s biologically incapable of telling anyone to get fucked in those terms. Maybe she’d say it when facing an especially thorny calculus problem, or when reading aloud from some classic novel that says “fuck” in it, but to another person? Never.

But Alana doesn’t need swear words to tell Evan what she thinks of his flimsy excuses for inconsistencies in his story, or his relationship with Zoe. He hasn’t heard what people are saying about them, but with all the speculation about him and Connor, he can imagine it well enough. So instead of his first hasty plan to convince Alana he’s telling the truth — tear off the sleeve he’s started wearing on his left arm again, show her the words there, and claim that they were the last thing he ever heard from Connor, that their souls were two halves of the same whole — he goes on the offensive, demanding to know why Alana cares anyway.

“Because you were lab partners?” he suggests, deliberately venomous. “Or because, I don’t know, maybe because you want another extracurricular for your college applications?”

Alana draws back from him, wounded.

“Because I know what it’s like to feel invisible,” she says, voice quavering. It could be from tears or fury. “Just like Connor. To feel invisible and alone and like nobody would even notice if you vanished into thin air. I bet you used to know what that felt like, too.”

She walks away at her usual brisk pace, and Evan knows it’s not the end of anything — he doubts it’s even the last time they’ll talk about Connor — yet he can’t shake the feeling of having been slapped, or of staring into a cracked mirror, a shattered but recognizable reflection of himself.

* * *

He goes to find Jared, to beg him for help face to face, and of course the first thing Jared does is laugh.

It’s infuriating. He’s given Jared every part of the truth, every piece of himself, throughout this mess, and what has Jared given him? Useless, bitter advice and a pile of fake emails that’s only caused him more trouble. And now, nothing, except an exhortation to remember who his friends are. What a fucking hypocrite.

Jared thinks he knows Evan so well? Evan knows him too, better than anyone, and he’s perfectly willing to prove it.

“I thought the only reason you even talk to me is because of your car insurance?”

Jared’s smirk slips. “So?”

“So,” Evan says, mimicking his tone the way Jared has done to him so often, “maybe the only reason you talk to me, Jared, is because you don’t have any other friends.” Those camp friends Jared talks about all the time? Evan’s never heard a single one of their names.

“I could tell everyone everything,” Jared shouts, much too loud, coming completely unhinged. Whatever façade of control he had is gone, and he’s obviously forgotten that “everything” means _everything_ — not just what Evan’s done, but what Jared’s done, too, every terrible thing they’ve done together and to one another. They’re inseparable.

“Go ahead,” Evan taunts. “Do it. Tell everyone how you helped write emails pretending to be a kid who killed himself.”

Jared makes a sound like he’s been punched, a desperate gasp, but no words. For a beat, he just stares slack-jawed at Evan, and too late, far too late, the words printed on Jared’s chest, right over his heart, force their way out of Evan’s distant memories and into his mind.

_a kid who killed himself._

Oh.

Oh no. No no no no.

He’s fucked up. He’s fucked up so, so badly.

And he knows what comes next.

“Fuck you, Evan.” Jared is on the verge of tears, and they both know that when one of them starts crying, the other is sure to follow. “Asshole.”

The four words Evan’s dreaded all his life, from the one person he thought would always be there.

Jared turns and runs, of course. It’s what everyone’s been doing to Evan this year.

Evan just stands there, frozen. More than anything, he wants to chase after Jared, to call out an apology, to beg him to turn back, but he can’t make his legs work, and he’s just been given the clearest possible sign that it would be pointless anyway. He’s been missing what’s right in front of him for ten years.

* * *

Evan tells the Murphys the truth about Connor, in halting words and through sobs, after two days of chaos online, and he doesn’t mention Jared’s name, not even once.

At some point, Larry stops asking questions, just watches the truth come out stone-faced — _total denial,_ whispers a small voice in the back of his mind. Cynthia is crying too hard to speak once he talks about the orchard and Ellison Park. And Zoe…

“How could you do this?” she demands to know.

He explains, or he tries. That there’s so much he lacks, and always has. That sometimes when you see someone who has what you want, who _is_ what you want, you try to make them fit into your life, to twist them to the shape of what you’re missing.

Zoe doesn’t respond to that, except by looking at him once more and walking away, her parents close behind. Her last question is emblazoned on Evan’s mind, and nowhere else.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you prefer your angst completely unmoderated by anything even resembling happiness, then this is the end of the fic, and you can proceed directly to the comment section.  
> If you'd like an ending that's at least slightly hopeful, then go to the next chapter.


	2. look at me standing here again

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from "As Good As New" by ABBA.

After the fact, Evan’s not sure which happened first: his decision to finally call Zoe and ask to meet her somewhere, just to talk, or his mark turning to a completely different set of four words.

It’s not so much a chicken-egg problem as it is a losing-track-of-time problem. His morning went like this: he woke up, he resolved to make the call that he’d been thinking about for weeks, he dialed the number, he lost his nerve for about ten seconds before forcing himself to hit the call button, he talked to Zoe for a minute or two, he hung up, he happened to glance at his arm and realize that the words there were different, and then he freaked out for as long as it took him to Google “can soul marks change am i dying.”

According to Google, soul marks  _ can  _ change, and he’s not dying, or if he is, it’s for completely unrelated reasons. It happens to slightly less than one percent of the population, for one of two reasons. 

First reason: multiple soulmates, one after the other. As soon as your first soulmate leaves you forever, your mark changes to whatever your new soulmate’s last words to you are. (Apparently having more than one mark or mate at the same time has never happened.) Evan dismisses that explanation, since  _ fuck you, Evan. Asshole. _ has stuck around for most of the past year. It was there last week, for sure.

Second reason: one soulmate changes so completely that they may as well be a new person, and it becomes possible for their paths to cross again, or for them to become someone else’s soulmate. It’s incredibly rare, and, if Wikipedia is to be trusted, one of the strongest pieces of evidence for the existence of free will.

Evan looks down at his arm for the hundredth time that day. It now says  _ because I love you. _

Has he changed that much?

* * *

He can drive, now, but his mom’s car is getting fixed, and she took his to go to work. So Evan takes the bus, and walks the rest of the way to the Connor Murphy Memorial Orchard.

When he arrives, Zoe is already there, waiting on a bench amidst the saplings. She looks older, more tired. Disillusioned. Nervous, too.

“Hey,” Evan says, and Zoe looks up and simply says, “Hi.”

It’s awkward, but not much more than their conversations were when they were dating. God, that’s a sad thought.

They talk about senior year and community college and Pottery Barn, and they laugh. When Evan lets the phrase “overpriced home decor” slip out, he can’t help thinking that it’s something Jared would say. 

Then the conversation turns to Connor.

Zoe insists that his story saved her parents, and Evan trusts her, but he struggles to believe her. He doesn’t deserve their protection for lying to them, let alone their thanks.

“It’s weird,” he says, then realizing how that sounds, quickly clarifies, “I, um… over the fall, I found this, um, yearbook thing my class made in eighth grade. Most people did, like, collages of their friends. Connor’s was a list of his ten favorite books.” Did he bring the list with him? He definitely meant to. “I’ve been trying to read all of them.” He’s gotten through seven of them by now, even though he had to put down  _ The Little Prince _ for a week after reading about the prince leaving his rose behind.

Zoe watches him, saying nothing.

“I know it’s not the same thing as knowing him — it’s not, at all, but, I don’t know, it’s…”

“Something.” 

Something. Not everything.

“It’s been… hard.” He can tell it’s an understatement. “It’s been a hard year.”

“I know.” It’s not just her. “I’ve been wanting to call you for a long time. I didn’t really know what I would say, but then I just… I decided to call you anyway.”

“I’m happy you did.”

They stand in silence, listening to the birds and the wind.

“I wish we could have met now,” Evan says. “Today. For the first time.” In this orchard, without knowing about the lies and hurt that built it, permeating every inch of the soil.

“Me too.”

Does she mean it?

Did she miss him?

Without really thinking about it, Evan shifts closer, and Zoe steps back, reaching for her bag. “I should probably…”

He backpedals, moving away twice as fast as she had. “Of course.”

“It’s just, exams are this week…”

“No, totally.”

Zoe turns around, and Evan scrambles for one final thing to say.

“Can I ask you, though?” What  _ can  _ he ask? “Why did, um, why did you want to meet here?”

He waits, breath bated, while she looks around, for what might be the end of their last conversation, ever. She tugs at one strap of her bag before she answers.

“I wanted to be sure you saw this,” Zoe says softly.

She walks away, toward the parking lot, vanishing to a speck as small as he feels in the immenseness of the orchard.

So maybe they weren’t meant to be. That just means Zoe will find someone else, someone who’s right for her. Evan hopes that she does, and that they’re happy together.

And maybe he’s complete all by himself.

* * *

The closest bus stop is nearly a mile away.  _ I should have told Alana to put one in the plans for the orchard, _ he thinks, letting himself laugh once he determines that there’s no one around to give him a judgmental look for it.

It’s been over a year since he last talked to Alana. She’s probably still mad at him.

He comes to an intersection where cars are whizzing through in all directions, just frequently enough to keep him from crossing by any means short of full-on sprinting. Pressing the WALK button has no effect whatsoever. Jared told him once that most of them aren’t even supposed to work.

(“They’re there to make you feel like you’re in control,” he’d said. “But shit just keeps happening regardless of what you do. And if you ignore it, you might get hit by a car.”

“That’s depressing.”

“It’s true.”)

A blue minivan pulls up to the crosswalk, stopping so abruptly that its wheels screech. Nothing’s special about the car itself — it’s probably a Toyota or Honda or one of those — but a long scratch on the passenger side, at waist height, reaches from the side mirror to the trunk, the kind of scratch Evan’s only ever seen on one other minivan. And the driver looks almost like — no. No, it can’t be. 

The passenger window rolls down, revealing the driver more clearly. He’s in short sleeves, and his right arm, in letters too bright to be a tattoo, bears the words  _ I love you too. _

Evan’s heart pounds in his chest.

“Hey,” Jared says. “Want a ride?”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Feel free to:
> 
> \- leave kudos  
> \- yell at me in the comments  
> \- yell at me on Tumblr @nothingunrealistic  
> \- step outside and yell to an uncaring sky


End file.
